use a feminist historical approach to critically examine theories about how and why fertility decline in Britain occurred and to explore the importance of gender and power in reshaping parenthood and sexuality in social policy and personal lives

use histories of marriage, sexuality, parenthood, birth control and population policy to illuminate the connections between procreative sexuality, personal l

The image ‘Glasgow's miles better’ was deliberately constructed by the City Council, avowedly to make Glaswegians feel better about Glasgow but in fact largely on behalf of business. But it begged a question – ‘miles better for whom?’ Certainly, the city centre was better for shoppers and visitors and the new roads were literally ‘miles better’ for motorists, but the spiralling problems of the housing schemes provided stark counter-images. In other words, as with all images, the

Oil Lives consists of a series of photographs of an individual and some written text based on interviews with them. Two of these series are reproduced in this section, with Logan's ‘War Scrapbook’ in between them. Take some time to look at the photographs and to read the words accompanying them. Try to work out first what parts of the photographs have been brought together from different originals. What do Owen Logan's decisions about how to picture the industry and some of its workers su

When you are absolutely sure that you know what the diagram or table is all about, start to look for patterns, for discrepancies, for peaks and troughs, for anything unusual. Diagrams and tables are highly patterned information, and they often tell a relatively simple story underneath. Don't get bogged down in the relationship between individual numbers, but look to see whether one relationship is like another, or whether one set of numbers stands out significantly from the rest.

Phenomenologists focus on how bodies are experienced at a subjective and intersubjective (relational) level. Phenomenological psychologists seek to transcend the mind-body dualism, arguing that all we have is an intelligent body, with the body and mind one and the same: not simply biology; we are our body and, through this, perform selfhood. This bodily experience is also often pre-reflective and extra-discursive – we experience and use our body before we think about it. And it is through u

The binding of features emerges as being a very significant process when displays are brief, because there is so little time in which to unite them. With normal viewing, such as when you examine the letters and words on this page, it is not obvious to introspection that binding is taking place. However, if, as explained above, it is a necessary precursor to conscious awareness, the process must also occur when we examine long-lived visual displays. Researchers have attempted to demonstrate th

I introduced Section 1 by suggesting that the auditory system had a special problem: unlike the visual system, it needed processes which would permit a listener to attend to a specific set of sounds without being confused by the overlap of other, irrelevant noises. The implication of that line of argument was that vision had no need of any such system. However, although we do not see simultaneously everything that surrounds us, we can certainly see more than one thing at a time. Earlie

In recent years many psychologists have become interested in language as an important human ‘product’ (the symbolic data described in Section 2.3 above). There are various ways in which psychologists analyse conversations, data from interviews and written texts. One of the most popular methods is content analysis

This course is concerned with the very things that we, as ordinary people, talk about as a consequence of listening to radio, watching television or reading newspapers and magazines: the programmes and articles that constitute media output. We examine the everyday evidence of celebrity activity – what academic media analysts call ‘texts’. Texts are socially constructed assemblages of items such as spoken or written words, or pictures.

Bernard Swynghedauw explores with us a still quite unknown biodiversity, which plays an essential role for our development: the microbiota. It consists of all the microorganisms living in our organism, which can be indispensable for our "good health" or, on the contrary, harmful.

Bernard Swynghedauw proposes an overview of the new medical landscape, marked by the emergence of several risks and diseases. He especially explores the age, the infectious risk and the immune risk, and underlines the necessity to take into account different factors to explain the public health issues.